Read Online Ellis Peters - George Felse 02 - Death and the Joyful Woman by Ellis Peters - Free Book Online

the main shopping centre, but tucked away in a quiet street in the lee of the parish church, and therefore clear of the business traffic which made the town bedlam all through the day. Even there, however, parking was a problem, and George had to take his Morris a good way past the house in order to find a vacant space into which he could insert it. He was lucky, the red Karmann-Ghia was there at the kerb, so Kitty was in. It was nearly noon when she opened the door to him, in a sweater and skirt and a pair of flat, childish sandals, and gazed at him for a moment with nothing in her eyes but patient bewilderment, waiting for him to state his business.
    “My name is Felse,” said George. “I’m a police officer, Miss Norris.” The bewilderment vanished so promptly, she stepped back from the doorway so instantly, that he knew she knew. “You’ve heard already about Mr. Armiger?”
    “Mr. Shelley telephoned me,” she said. “Come in, Mr. Felse.”
    She was looking at him, he noticed, with a certain grave curiosity which he thought was not all for his office but partly for himself, and he was human enough and male enough to be flattered and disarmed by her attention. Some people cannot look directly at you in conversation even when they have nothing to hide; Kitty, he thought, would look straight at you even if she had a guilty secret to hide, because it was the way she was made, and she wouldn’t be able to help it.
    “I’m making investigations into Mr. Armiger’s death, and there are points on which I think you may be able to help me, if you will. I promise not to keep you very long.”
    “I wasn’t doing anything,” she said, leading him into a big, pastel-coloured room, lofty and unexpectedly sunlit, for she lived on the fourth floor, and the buildings opposite were lower, and showed her only their roofs. “Please sit down, Mr. Felse. May I get you a drink?” She turned and looked at him with a small, wry smile. “It sounds like a Raymond Chandler gambit, doesn’t it? But I was just going to have a sherry, actually. And after all, you’re not a private eye, are you?”
    “More of a public one,” said George. It wasn’t going as he’d expected, but he was content to let it wander; it might arrive somewhere very interesting if he let well alone.
    “I hope you like it dry,” said Kitty deprecatingly. “It’s all I’ve got.” The hand that proffered the glass was not quite steady, he saw, but there was every excuse for that tremor.
    “Thanks, I do. I’m afraid it must have been a great shock to you, Miss Norris—Mr. Armiger’s death.”
    “Yes,” she said in a low voice, and sat down directly in front of him and looked straight at him, just as he’d forseen she would have to do. “Mr. Shelley and Miss Hamilton both rang up to tell me,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe it. You know what I mean. He was so alive. Whether you liked him or not, whether you approved of him or not, there he was, and you couldn’t imagine the world without him. And there were things about him that were admirable, you know. He was brave. He came up with nothing, and he took on the world to get where he got. And even when he had so much he wasn’t afraid. People often learn to be afraid when they have a lot to lose, but he was never afraid of anything. And he could be generous, too, sometimes. And good fun. If you were a child he wasn’t afraid or ashamed to play with you like a child—even though there was really nothing childish left in him. I suppose it was because children made good playthings for him, because we were satisfied with lots of action, and never made difficulties of principle for him like grown-ups do. It was very easy to get on with him then. And very hard afterwards.” She looked down into her glass, and for the first time George saw, as Dominic had seen, the essential sadness of her face, and like Dominic was dumbfounded and engaged by it, inextricably caught into the mystery of her